SWIM: A Switch Manager for Datacenter Networks

As modern datacenter networks (DCNs) grow to support hundreds of thousands of servers and beyond, managing network equipment -- such as routers, firewalls, and load balancers -- becomes increasingly complex. Network attributes such as IP address allocations and BGP neighbor relations are scattered among various network engineering groups, which makes troubleshooting the network a cumbersome task. In addition, network vendor diversity leads to an explosion of vendor-specific management systems or single-use automation scripts, limiting network scalability while increasing the time required to perform management tasks. In this article, the authors propose a unified network management system, Switch Manager (SWIM), to cope with the growth by standardizing the language for describing network attributes and unifying the interface for executing management actions on the network equipment.